Vizio Shows What Happens When U.S. Fascism And TV Enshittification Meet
We’ve noted for years how the “smart” TV sector is at the forefront of enshittification. It’s a sector full of companies that have doubled down on annoying ads and surveillance to the detriment of the customer. And while absolutely fixated on monetizing consumer surveillance data, it routinely fails to put anywhere close to the same attention on consumer privacy, resulting in a lot of scandal.
Most of these companies, like Roku, want to inject ads into everything, from your pause menus and GUI to when the TV goes into standby. We’re long past the point where they make more money off of ads and consumer surveillance than they do off selling the hardware.
Walmart-owned Vizio has been trying to leverage standby mode for a while via what it calls “scenic mode.” Vizio’s “scenic mode” is supposed to display “relaxing, ambient content when your TV is idle for a period of time” which Vizio claims “adds to the environment of your home or office.”
Except one Vizio owner was recently a bit annoyed to leave his room and come back to authoritarian propaganda sponsored by the Department For Homeland Security:
“I left the [TV] idle while I went to the other room to play with my dog. After about a half an hour, I started hearing [US Secretary of Homeland Security] Kristi Noem praising Trump and telling immigrants to get out of America, over and over. I went in to check, and caught this video looping 3 more times before it went back to the nature clips.”
If you’ve been napping, the Trump administration has been “renditioning” people they claim to be illegal immigrants and criminals off the streets and sending them to prisons in El Salvador as part of a lucrative contract with that country’s authoritarian leader. Except when journalists have investigated the renditions they’ve found there’s often no evidence to support any criminal behavior.
Some very ugly “mistakes” are being made, including sending innocent Maryland fathers to prisons in countries they’ve never been to. Whoops a daisy.
It’s unpopular, racist bullshit. But to try and sell this unpopular, racist bullshit, US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has been running infomercials threatening illegals that they’ll be “hunted down” if they enter the country illegally. The informercials falsely claim that “weak leadership has left our borders wide open, flooding our communities with drugs, human trafficking, and violent criminals.”
Some of the Reddit users who saw the message say it got stuck in a loop, adding to the dystopian nature of the unpopular, racist bullshit:
It’s entirely possible that the ad was run in error, but it’s hard to confirm since Vizio and parent company Walmart haven’t responded to media requests for comment. Vizio has, at times, bragged about how it can leverage its consumer surveillance and ad technologies to work in partnership with political campaigns and target millions of households with political messaging.
By the way, here’s Consumer Reports’ guide on how to turn off many of your TVs more invasive features.